Bedrock Data Offers Automated Remedy For Cloud Data Silos

Big data startup Bedrock Data is debuting software that the company says significantly reduces the time and cost of combining customer data across multiple cloud applications.

The new product, named Fusion, creates opportunities for Bedrock Data's strategic service provider partners who specialize in data integration, management and analysis services, said Zak Pines, Bedrock Data's marketing vice president, in an interview with CRN.

Businesses are increasingly relying on multiple cloud applications such as CRM apps from Salesforce and Oracle NetSuite, marketing automation systems from Marketo and HubSpot, email applications from Constant Contact and MailChimp, and ecommerce software such as Shopify.

The result: Silos of disparate data that impede efforts to get a complete "360-degree" view of a business's customers.

"Companies want to leverage their data from different systems for decision making," Pines said. "This is a huge part of our product vision."

Bedrock Data, founded in 2012 and based in Boston, previously developed its Sync software that synchronizes data between multiple applications, such as standardizing and de-duplicating customer data across multiple CRM, marketing and ecommerce systems.

The new Fusion product is designed for businesses that want to consolidate data from multiple cloud applications for analysis and decision-making tasks, Pines said.

Using the library of connectors Bedrock Data developed for Sync, Fusion collects data from operational cloud applications in near-real-time and combines it into a database in a standard format, updating and de-duplicating data and resolving conflicting data along the way.

Fusion then makes the data available to a broad range of reporting and analytics tools and dashboard systems. The system puts the data into a MySQL database format and provides standard SQL keys that business intelligence tools use to access the data.

"That makes cross-functional analysis possible," Pines said. "It accelerates time-to-analysis." A business, for example, can examine sales and marketing data to better understand whether the company's marketing dollars are being spent in the most effective way.

While many of Fusion's capabilities have been available in earlier generations of ETL (extract, transform and load), data cleansing and data integration software, those products often require a great of data preparation work and manual integration and programming, Pines said.

Fusion automates the application connectivity, data preparation and database assembly processes, greatly reducing the time and costs generally associated with such projects, according to Pines.

With Fusion's emphasis on automation and self-service, Bedrock Data is especially focused on selling to mid-size businesses that may have limited IT resources, Pines said.

Bedrock Data works with a number of "agency" partners, most on a referral basis, including solution providers, strategic service providers, systems integrators and marketing system consultants.

The company also partners with the vendors whose applications Bedrock Data's software connects to and with the developers of the business analytics tools that use the processed data.

Fusion is available now through an early access program, Pines said, as Bedrock Data ramps up sales of the new software.